Only Trump could turn a line of destitute and terrified people walking thousands of miles in hopes of finding safety in the America that all admired until recently, into a caravan of desperados bent on breaking laws, robbing, stealing and raping Americans.

Actually that’s wrong – the last time I know of was when Gen. Douglas MacArthur ran the bonus marchers off the mall in Washington, D.C. The bonus marchers were veterans of World War I, trying to survive the Great Depression. They came to Washington to petition their government to give them their promised World War I bonuses a little early, since they were desperate and destitute. Disobeying orders, MacArthur ran them off. MacArthur disobeyed four presidents until Truman finally fired him for insisting on widening the Korean War into China.

But the Bonus marchers and the Caravan both remind me more of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath – farmers who lost their lands to the banks after drought, the dust bowl and the Great Depression made it impossible to farm or earn a living in those farming communities. They joined a sad and sorry march from Oklahoma to California. They were farmers, not thieves or rapists. But they were vilifield as beggars. Oakies, originally meaning from Oklahoma, became an epithet. To the loss of their income, the loss of their farms, often the loss of their families, they now added the loss even of human empathy. Cold and hungry, the migrants gathered in shantytowns they called Hoovervilles, named for the president in office when the Great Depression began. They lit fires in steel drums to keep warm. I wish Steinbeck had written a sequel. He described great suffering and often death. Yet some percent of them survived and eventually melded into the population of California.

I thought we had outgrown demonizing the homeless and destitute, but not Donald Trump.

I thought we had outgrown running off the homeless and destitute like vermin, but not Donald Trump.

I thought we had learned that the problems of massive unemployment are not the workers’ making, but not Donald Trump.

I thought we had learned that farmers who’d lost their lands, shopkeepers, factory workers and miners who lost their jobs, were decent people suffering from forces beyond their control, but not Donald Trump.

Come back John Steinbeck and remind us all of our humanity.

Come back Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and show us how to care for our fellow human beings and build a better world out of love and compassion.

Come back America and show a large heart to each other and to the cold and desperate trying to reach the safety of our shores.

We can do it. There is no economic reason why we can’t. We could get to work rebuilding our infrastructure and make plenty of work for everyone. This is America. Si se puede; yes, we can and be stronger for it.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, November 13, 2018.

The tragedy in Florida is linked to issues abroad. One candidate sometimes suggests we could solve our problems by isolationism, keeping our troops home, and sometimes by wiping out our adversaries with overwhelming force. His adversary has won over American military leadership with a fairly hard-nosed approach to international politics meshed with the belief that part of America’s international strength comes from our ideological appeal and social justice. What’s going to work?

The Middle East has been getting more violent. And the U.S. has been struggling to figure out how to handle it. George H.W. Bush was careful not to unravel power relations there when he rolled Iraq back from Kuwait. George W. Bush was less cautious, eliminating the Iraqi power structure without a plan to replace it. Since then we’ve been fighting multiple wars in multiple countries. Wars with guerilla tactics like these are costly. Al Qaeda and ISIL or DAESH have learned to motivate individuals or small groups outside of traceable networks. Military forces work poorly against that kind of enemy. We may be a superpower against some obstacles, but not all. The history of warfare has been a multi-millennium cycle of upstarts defeating the super powers of prior ages with new tactics.

What if we disengaged from the Middle East? I doubt Americans have the stomach for it. Israel, our so-called “ally,” continually breaks its promises to America, so the Israeli mouse drives both American Middle Eastern policy and its consequences. America cannot be an honest broker in the Middle East while backing a government of heedless buckaroos who learn nothing from the failures and constant irritation of seven decades of war, eviction of Palestinians and indiscriminate retaliation. Still less can we be an honest broker by engaging in the same tactics that make refugees of millions and radicalize too many. Who are we to criticize the Israelis when our policies have been more and more like theirs? We too pay the price. Our removal of Premier Mossadegh and replacement with the former Shah of Iran contributed to the Revolution of 1979 and subsequent demonization of America. U.S. military moves created chaos in the Sunni world, pushed Turkey toward autocracy, and helped destabilize Europe with a flow of refugees not seen since the World Wars.

Pulling out would leave a power vacuum that those we despise and sometimes fear would fill. If Russia or China were fool enough to move in, the throw weight of Islamic extremism would refocus on them. The short-run consequences, however, could be

Our policies toward the Middle East need to be rethought in light of new realities. Power relations in the Middle East have been drastically reshaped in the last fifteen years. And Saudi Arabia has been playing a double game, supporting radical Islam in return for denying the clerics the keys to governmental power, creating a Hobson’s choice for us. Obama has tried to avoid both disengagement and warfare, but his efforts to reshape thinking about the Middle East have, not surprisingly, run into a barrier of incomprehension. The U.S. should not be driven by the unreliable machinations of paranoid premiers, two-bit dictators and fractured armies in a region of declining importance to the U.S.

America accomplished a great deal in the past as a model of a fair and decent state. Foreign policy isn’t merely a contest of muscle and fire power. Its complexity requires a lot of patience. It took half of century to wait out the Soviet Union. Much as some Republicans want to credit Reagan’s grand gestures, that victory was hatched under Truman and pursued by eight presidents of both parties, without any know-it-all buckaroos upending decades of careful policy. Can we do it again? We’re going to find out.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, June 14, 2016.